Now Clay lands with a right, what a beautiful swing,
And the punch raises the Bear clean out of the ring.
Liston is still rising and the ref wears a frown,
For he can’t start counting till Sonny comes down.
Now Liston is disappearing from view, the crowd is going frantic,
But radar stations have picked him up somewhere over the Atlantic.
Who would have thought when they came to the fight,
That they’d witness the launching of a human satellite?
Yes the crowd did not dream, when they put up the money,
That they would see a total eclipse of the Sonny.12
CLAY’S PERFORMANCE WON over an audience outside the world of boxing. While reporters hounded him about his association with the Black Muslims, Clay distanced himself publicly from the controversial sect. Instead of talking about his relationship with Malcolm or Elijah, he continued to craft a nonthreatening image—an image of a smiling, jovial “Negro,” an entertainer cracking harmless jokes and reciting poems, an act encouraged by his white managers. But the real Cassius Clay—the man who would become Muhammad Ali—could hardly hide his enthusiasm for the most controversial black organization in the country.
Dan Parker, a prominent columnist for the New York Journal-American, reported that while Clay was in New York, he visited corporate offices on Madison Avenue proudly wearing an NOI signet ring, a clear “badge of membership,” and showed people a picture of himself with Elijah Muhammad. Although Clay maintained that he had not joined the Nation, Parker and other sportswriters no longer doubted the boxer’s membership. Since July, when a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times caught him leaving the Muslims’ school, Clay’s association with the Nation had provoked suspicion that “he had been brain-washed by the Black Muslims.”13
The Louisville Sponsoring Group shared the reporter’s concerns and worked to disentangle Cassius from Malcolm. Job one, they thought, was to get their fighter out of New York City and away from Mosque No. 7. Since Cassius had returned from London, he had been markedly distant from his wealthy, white benefactors, reluctant to return to training under Dundee in Miami. Bill Faversham talked to Clay’s mother, Odessa, explaining the need to persuade Cassius to return to Miami. Promoter Bill King pitched in as well, explaining to Cassius that if he didn’t train in Miami there would be no Liston fight.14
He reluctantly returned south, but he still chafed under the LSG’s guidance. W. S. Cutchins, a prominent member of the group and president of Brown & Williamson Tobacco, reported that Cassius wanted larger paydays—“$200,000 after taxes” was the number that he fixed on—and no more television appearances, which he had come to consider undignified. “Fighting, not acting,” was his profession, he asserted, and even if the LSG upped his take for TV appearances to 60 percent, he was still not interested. Suddenly, it seemed, Cassius no longer wanted to jive on stage or sing songs with Liberace. He didn’t want to play the clown anymore.15
The LSG suspected that the Muslims, one in particular, had persuaded the young fighter to ignore the counsel of his white advisers. The group feared that they no longer spoke for Cassius because Malcolm X did. Malcolm didn’t want Clay singing and dancing on television like Stepin Fetchit. If Cassius was ever going to become a freedom fighter like Malcolm, he had to keep his gloves on outside the ring as well.
Cutchins’s solution to separating Clay from the Muslims was to schedule nontitle matches for him every few months. Then, between training in Miami and boxing in various cities, he would not have time for Malcolm. Only if they followed that plan could they get “just about 75% back to our normal relationship with him.”16
Yet Cassius kept slipping away from Miami to New York. There he met with an associate of Malcolm’s who would become his new business manager. Archie Robinson, a slight, bespectacled, soft-spoken man not much older than Clay, had first met the young boxer a few months earlier when Malcolm introduced them at the Muslims’ luncheonette. Malcolm worried that Cassius needed protection from manipulative white men who exploited black boxers and knew that he could trust Archie to keep an eye on him.17